Rehumanising Self-Determination: The Naga Experience and the Limits of State-Centred Peace

Written on 09 April 2026. Posted in News

BY  AKÜM LONGCHARI AND GAM ANGKANG SHIMRAY FOR INDIGENOUS DEBATES

In the peace process between the Indian state and the Naga people, the suspension of violence has not resulted in a resolution of the underlying conflict. This situation exposes the limitations of peace approaches managed exclusively by the state, as well as of a conception of self-determination reduced to institutional frameworks. The Naga struggle reveals self-determination as a living praxis, grounded in dignity, memory, and collective responsibility.

Across the postcolonial world, peace processes have often succeeded in suspending violence while failing to resolve the political conflicts that caused them. This contradiction is most evident in the Indo–Naga peace process where since 1997, ceasefires and negotiations have prevented a return to war yet not produced a resolution that addresses Naga self-determination. This condition reflects a deeper conceptual problem which confines self-determination within a state-centric Westphalian political imagination that prioritises territorial sovereignty over peoples’ political dignity.

This essay asserts the limits of state-centred peace and invites a rehumanising approach to self-determination. The authors weave together the Indigenous experience and how it may contribute to the global peace discourse. With this in mind, self-determination must be understood more broadly as a continuous political praxis grounded in collective identity, responsibility, and dignity. Lessons from the Naga struggle call for recovering an Indigenous worldview and praxis of self-determination to unlock the path toward humanisation and JustPeace.

The Westphalian Constraint on Self-Determination

The concept of sovereignty that emerged from the Westphalian order reorganised political authority around territorially bounded states. While this framework stabilised interstate relations, it simultaneously marginalised political communities whose sovereignty traditions pre-existed and exceeded the Westphalian order. Ironically, self-determination, a right associated with all peoples, was reduced to state-determination.

In the decolonisation era, self-determination was proclaimed ‘presumptively universal in scope … to benefit all segments of humanity,’ yet, in practice, it was selectively applied. Colonial territories became independent states, but Indigenous Peoples encapsulated within those states were rarely recognised as peoples with right to self-determination.

From an Indigenous perspective, decolonisation remains profoundly incomplete. Postcolonial states inherited colonial territorial logic, legal hierarchies, and governance models that prioritised national homogeneity over Indigenous plurality. As a result, many Indigenous Peoples experienced decolonisation not as liberation, but as a continuation of political domination under new authority.

Decolonisation without Indigenous political recognition is merely a change of administrators rather than transforming political relationships. For Indigenous Peoples, including the Nagas, decolonisation goes beyond state independence and means restoring political agency, historical voice, and moral authorship. This understanding is reflected in broader Asian Indigenous movements that articulate self-governance not simply as legal recognition, but as a democratic and ethical practice rooted in community and collective agency.

Self-Determination as Lived History

For Nagas, self-determination has been embedded in lived political experience, customary governance, and collective memory. Prior to incorporation into the Indian state, Naga people exercised political autonomy through village republics, inter-village alliances, and customary institutions grounded in moral accountability. Its political consciousness is also influenced by historical events compounded by moral injury and political denial that wounds collective dignity. Despite its history, the Naga political identity has persisted as a narrative of continuity that consistently defended its political existence.

Truly, Naga nationalism is a question of justice and not ethnic sentiments. Its moral-political assertion refuses to accept that a people can be administratively absorbed without ethical consent that has spanned generations. This assertion has been carried across generations. Self-determination in the Naga case remains a sustained political memory—a form of historical responsibility to ancestors, community, and future generations.

The state-led Indo–Naga peace process exemplifies conflict management rather than conflict transformation. While this strategy has reduced armed confrontation, it has produced fragmentation, weakened social cohesion, expanded corruption and impunity, eroded traditional institutions, and deepened public disillusionment toward conventional state-led peace processes.

State institutions, under the banner of development and peace, have intruded deeply into Naga society, while strategic cultural assimilation continues through education, administration, and economic integration. Protracted negotiations without resolution have normalised injustice, causing negative societal affects. Sadly, the peace process has weakened Naga cooperation and eventually produces compliance rather than consent.

Rehumanising Self-Determination

To move beyond this impasse, self-determination must be rehumanised and its ethical and cultural dimensions emancipated. Indigenous Peoples remind us that self-determination is not a destination, but a struggle for the recovery of dignity, wisdom, and solidarity. In this context, Indigenous activist Kenneth Deer asserts that no one owns the definition of self-determination and explains it as relational, shared, and negotiated. Ultimately, rehumanising self-determination requires restoring its meaning, confidence, and moral agency within political communities.

In a similar vein, Gam Shimray, Secretary-General of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), argues that “recovering meaning also means rebuilding this relational foundation — reviving the practices and environments that allow meaning-making to flourish again.” Without this relational recovery, political claims remain hollow. Self-determination cannot survive as a purely juridical concept; it must live within social relationships, cultural practices, and shared responsibility.

Ultimately, decolonisation is a rehumanising process that dignifies political relationships so that peoples are no longer treated as objects of governance but as co-creators of history. Thus, when self-determination is rehumanised, it becomes a requisite for ethical governance, peace and healing. Self-determination, therefore, remains a continuous political praxis. It is a right that people always have, not a right that derives from a single historical event.

Rethinking Sovereignty from the Naga Experience

The Naga experience compels us to rethink sovereignty itself. The dominant political discourse continues to equate sovereignty with exclusive territorial control exercised by states. Within this framework, sovereignty is treated primarily as a legal attribute of the state rather than as a people’s moral and political reality. Indigenous Peoples unsettle this assumption because sovereignty has never been understood merely as control over territory, but as political responsibility: a responsibility for collective identity, community continuity, moral order, and accountability to future generations, a relational ethic emphasised across Indigenous governance discourses.

Sovereignty, in this sense, is defined by the capacity to sustain a people as a moral and political community and not by dominating the space. It is exercised not only through formal institutions, but through memory, customary practice, and intergenerational responsibility. From this perspective, philosopher Hans Köchler observes that “it is not the state that is ‘eternal’ which enjoys ‘inalienable rights,’ but the people as a collective social and cultural reality.” When international law and political discourse centre on states rather than peoples, they produce a democratic deficit in which political legitimacy is derived from territorial inheritance rather than from the consent and continuity of political communities.

The Naga struggle demonstrates that sovereignty imposed without political consent cannot achieve moral legitimacy. Collective political will and imagination can creatively address the Naga question.  From this perspective, sovereignty must be reimagined as layered and relational. Such an understanding situates the state within a wider moral and political ecology.

Indigenous Self-Determination and the Future of Democratic Imagination

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms that self-determination includes self-government and effective participation in decisions affecting human beings. Yet, in practice, these standards remain persistently subordinated to state sovereignty claims. Recognition without implementation has become a central technique of contemporary colonial governance.

These contradictions raise a deeper question: whether modern political systems are capable of recognising political plurality without fear, and diversity without domination. The Naga experience exemplifies this contradiction as it is often framed through a security lens. Yet its persistence reveals a deeper democratic failure: the inability of postcolonial democracy to recognise peoples as political equals rather than as administrative populations.

The Nagas resonate with Indigenous experiences across the world, who consistently challenge the assumption that state sovereignty by design extinguishes prior political existence. In Latin America, North America, the Pacific, and Asia, Indigenous movements have insisted that encapsulation into modern states cannot dissolve their status as political communities. If democracy is to remain essential and relevant, it must adapt to accommodate layered sovereignties, overlapping identities, and differentiated political belonging. Unity imposed without recognition produces neither stability nor justice, but compliance without legitimacy.

From this perspective, the Naga struggle is a mirror that reflects the unresolved tension between modern state sovereignty and Indigenous political existence. It exposes the limits of a democratic imagination that has not yet learned to recognise peoples as co-creators of political order. In this sense, the Naga struggle is not only about Naga destiny. It raises the questions about the future credibility of postcolonial democracy itself.

Self-Determination as Humanisation

If self-determination is ultimately a question of human dignity and not territorial management, then its meaning cannot be exhausted by constitutional formulas or administrative arrangements. It must be understood as a moral and political claim to exist as a people whose history, identity, and future cannot be suppressed and erased by institutional convenience. Indigenous advocates argue that until political recognition aligns with human dignity, peace remains administratively managed, a condition found in the Naga context as well as among Indigenous Peoples in Asia.

The Naga experience illustrates this with particular clarity. What is at stake is not only a political settlement, but the recognition of a people as legitimate co-creators of political order rather than residual populations managed within inherited territorial frameworks. In this regard, rehumanising self-determination means rehumanising sovereignty itself. When sovereignty is reduced to territorial possession, it becomes an instrument of exclusion. However, when reimagined as accountable to history, to community, and to future generations, sovereignty becomes a foundation for ethical governance. A democratic order that cannot recognise Indigenous political existence ultimately weakens its own claim to democratic credibility.

Self-determination, when rehumanised, ceases to be a problem to be solved. It becomes a relationship to be honoured which transforms coexistence from forced accommodation into ethical partnership. Ultimately, self-determination is a moral force, a social movement, a political imagination, and a human aspiration. It is the foundation upon which all other rights rest. When self-determination is integral in the search for dignity and when peoples are placed at the centre of the humanisation process, then spaces for renewal, reconciliation and healing open. 

Aküm Longchari is the founder of the Naga newspaper The Morung Express and is involved in non-violent initiatives for peacebuilding, self-determination, and reconciliation. His doctoral thesis at the University of New England in Australia focused on self-determination as a resource for a just peace.

Gam Angkang Shimray is a Naga Indigenous human rights expert with over three decades of experience. He served as Secretary General of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) from 2016 to 2025, where he represented Indigenous Peoples from 14 Asian countries within United Nations human rights mechanisms.

Cover photo: Thousands of Naga people waving their “Star and Rainbow” flag. Photo: The Morung Express

Tags: Indigenous Debates